School supplies: Here’s what you can expect to pay at five retailers in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY — A new survey from LendingTree found that parents overwhelmingly – we’re talking 73% of the survey’s respondents – are stressed about how they will be able to afford back-to-school shopping this year. We are here to help.

For the fifth straight year, the KSL Investigators hit the same five retailers for school supplies: Walmart, Target, Dollar General, Smith’s, and Amazon.

And we shopped for the same back-to-school list given to us by a Utah middle-school teacher, for things like backpacks and all the writing and erasing goodies our kids need to hit the ground running when the school bell rings on the first day.

Our goal is to put together a little cheat sheet so parents can see where they can save on all these supplies. Most of the stuff seems to be pretty comparable store-to-store. But like we do every year, we found certain pricing outliers.

Like at Smith’s, where we’ve never found a reusable water bottle for even close to what we’ve paid at other stores. This year is no exception; the bottle at Smith’s ran us $12.99. That is more than double what we paid at any other store.

Scientific calculators also proved to have a wide range in pricing. The cheapest we could find on Amazon cost us $16.78, more than tripling the $4.97 we paid Walmart for its least expensive calculator we found on the shelves.

Dollar General didn’t have scientific calculators. They do sell your basic, run-of-the-mill pocket calculators. Though the model they had available was $5.50 – a little over 50 cents more expensive than the scientific calculator we purchased just down the street at Walmart.

Adding up all the loot, we paid the most to get out the door at Amazon at $63.01. Smith’s was the next highest at $60.44. Target ranked third in its supply prices costing us $47.86. At $30, Dollar General was the second lowest-costing marketplace for school supplies while Walmart took the cheapest honors at $25.48.

And our years-long experiment also offers some promising news regarding inflation. Last year, it cost us more to get out the door at every single store, but not this year.

In 2024, we paid 18.8% less at Target for the same school supplies than we did last year. At Walmart, we saw a 28.7% drop in prices compared to 2023. In fact, at the two big box stores, we found ourselves basically back to the prices we saw in 2021.

Our annual experiment doesn’t factor in stuff like clothes, shoes, and athletic equipment, among other gear. Factoring in those costs could explain why LendingTree found two in five shoppers say they expect they’ll go in the red because of back-to-shopping this year, with the average debt reaching $793.